Daniel Kramer is to step down as ENO’s Artistic Director at the end of July 2019 in order to focus on directing more opera and theatre full time

He will continue to work with ENO until the end of 2019, as Artistic Consultant, to oversee the Orpheus series of four operas.

Stuart Murphy, CEO, ENO said: “I have loved working with Daniel as Artistic Director from day one. His continual desire to push for distinctive creative is hugely admirable, and his energy, sense of humour and passion for bringing new stories to life and nurturing new talent has been completely contagious.

“His seasons have been marked by a huge mix, from the Olivier nominated Turn of the Screw at Regent’s Park and Paul Bunyan at Wilton’s Music Hall, the Olivier Award winning Porgy and Bess, to Salome, Iolanthe, and The Merry Widow, to the world premiere of Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel. Daniel’s War Requiem was a beautiful and stately reflection on the horrors of war, and deserves all of the accolades that it has received to date.

“He leaves with the very best wishes from everyone at ENO.”

Harry Brunjes, Chair, ENO said: “Over the course of his three years in the role, Daniel Kramer’s focus on creative artistic output is the underlying reason why our most recent season was both thought provoking and entertaining, as well as commercially successful.

“On behalf of the board I would like to personally thank him for all of his hard work and dedication to ENO. We are so pleased that he will continue to work with us on the Orpheus series and look forward to welcoming Daniel back at the London Coliseum. We wish him the best of luck as he pursues fantastic opportunities around the world.”

Martyn Brabbins, Music Director, ENO said: “Collaborating with Daniel has been an enormously rewarding and fruitful experience. I wish him all the good luck for the future and look forward to working with him again in the autumn on Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus – a project that we are both passionate about.

“The season ahead has a huge breadth and depth of work, and I continue to be excited for the next chapter for ENO.”

Daniel Kramer said: “I am proud to leave ENO after a season that has broken box office records, innovated and challenged, while delivering commercial success. We have recruited thousands of new, diverse and young audience members, and over-achieved our year box office target, delivering on our promise to provide “Opera for All” and reflect the diversity of our culture. I am particularly proud that the work we initiated outside the Coliseum has been such an equally resounding success with numerous 4 and 5 star reviews, awards and nominations.

“I am looking forward to continuing my relationship with ENO, overseeing the Orpheus series I commissioned, as well as directing Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus. Stepping back will allow me to focus full-time on my 2019/20 freelance directing commitments of La boheme and Nixon in China in Europe, and War Requiem in Taiwan. Never has an experience been more fruitful, more demanding, nor more clarifying to my beliefs as an artist. I thank everyone who crossed my path at ENO and wish Stuart, Martyn, the Board and everyone at ENO the absolute best in this new chapter.”

In order to ensure a seamless transition for the rest of the 2019/20 season, and as ENO plan up to the 2021/22 season, Bob Holland in his role as Associate Artistic Director will continue to work closely with Martyn as well as with the rest of the artistic team to deliver plans beyond those that ENO are committed to already.

ENO presents the world premiere of Iain Bell’s Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel with an all-star cast of iconic British singers

Opens Saturday 30 March at 7.30pm 

In one of the most anticipated operatic events of the year, the story of the most notorious serial killer in British history is told from the perspective of his victims. An extraordinary cast of some of the most distinguished female singers of the last 50 years of UK opera assemble to give voice to these women, so long overshadowed by the mystery surrounding the identity of their killer. ENO Artistic Director Daniel Kramer and Music Director Martyn Brabbins reunite after the success of War Requiem to deliver this vital new work.

Josephine Barstow, Susan Bullock, Lesley Garrett, Janis Kelly, Marie McLaughlin and Natalya Romaniw provide the unparalleled array of talent onstage, portraying a community of grinding hardship as it comes under terrifying attack. The 1888 Whitechapel dosshouse that unites the victims provides the setting for a look at the hypocrisy of a Victorian society that could discard working class women so readily.

Iain Bell is one of the UK’s most impressive young composers, mining British historical and literary subjects for his critically acclaimed operas. His first, A Harlot’s Progress, drew on the paintings of Hogarth; the second, A Christmas Carol, (5*, The Financial Times) on Dickens and the third, In Parenthesis, (5*, The Independent) on First World War poetry.

Librettist Emma Jenkins, whose relationship with ENO goes back to her time as a staff director with the company, collaborates with Bell for the second time after In Parenthesis (with David Antrobus). Her previous libretto, for Rhondda Rips it Up!, dealt with the Suffragette movement and was hailed as a ‘tremendous creation’ (5*, The Times).

Dame Josephine Barstow sings dosshouse proprietor Maud, a character created for the opera. With a history of performances at the world’s leading opera houses going back 50 years, her ENO credits include Salome‚ Tosca,  Violetta in La traviata‚ Leonore in Fidelio‚ and many more. She made an appearance at the National Theatre in 2017 in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. She was made a Dame in 1995.

Internationally acclaimed baritone Alan Opie marks 50 years since his ENO debut, creating the role of the Pathologist. His previous performances with the company included Bartolo in The Barber of Seville in 2017 and Germont in La traviata in 2018. His performance in the title role of Verdi’s Falstaff earned him a nomination for the 1998 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera.

ENO Music Director Martyn Brabbins conducts, marking the second collaboration of the season with Artistic Director Daniel Kramer after the acclaimed War Requiem, and his third production of the season after September 2018’s Salome. A champion of contemporary music, he has conducted hundreds of premieres over his career, described as ‘the musician’s musician’ (The Guardian). His most recent world premiere for ENO was Nico Muhly’s Marnie in 2017.

Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel opens Saturday 30 March at 7.30pm for 6 performances: 30 March, 03, 05, 08, 10, and 12 April at 7.30pm

500 tickets for £20 or less are available for each performance. Tickets start from £12*.

Plus booking fee of £2.25. No booking fee in person

How did you celebrate International Women’s Day? Probably not with your feet up listening to Hildegard of Bingen.

That kind of celebration comes on Thursday evening 21 March at St Paul’s Worthing  . . . 7pm doors/bar-café  . . . 7.30pm concert-play about her life: ‘Vision – the Imagined Testimony of Hildegard of Bingen’. It features TV primetime series actress Teresa Banham as Hildegard and musicians The Telling whose Clare Norburn wrote this. Direction is by long-term TV creator, Nicholas Renton. There’s Q&A including audience questions.

If I start talking about Hildegard of Bingen now, I’ll never stop. I’ll ‘just’ say that the figurehead woman of The Early Middle Ages inspired The Body Shop founder Anita Roddick with her natural healing, nutrition, mysticism and philosophy. She’s a modern heroine.

Her reputation and action battled its way though male-dominated Medieval society until its leaders and rulers finally swallowed something humble and sought her advice. And it strove on through a further nine centuries of obscurity until today’s men granted her recent sainthood. Do we call that modern progress?

Her poetry and music, discovered only in the 1970s, makes her the first composer in history to be known by name, and now the western world’s favourite female composer. It’s music that sounds out of this world, yet is earthly and sensual, and stirs our own souls’ connectivity with the imagined but undefinable. What a musical personality to possess.

As an experience, with these artistes, at this venue, in this ambience, this intimate presentation, it will be special. Full information, production pictures, links, opinions, insights, recommendations, click to ‘About’ and ‘Discussion’ at:

https://www.facebook.com/events/353713648779706/

Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra, Sunday 3 March, 2.45pm, Brighton Dome

Symphonic concerts generally fall into the same pattern – an overture, a concerto, an interval and then a symphony. But when you introduce a theme into the concert, the shape changes completely.

For this our seventh concert in the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra’s season, conducted by Barry Wordsworth, we have taken the theme of travel and the means to get to those far off exotic destinations. The holiday season is not that far away, so let your local orchestra introduce you to some stunning locations, and conjure up in music the means to get there.

We open with probably the most popular and evocative travel piece written for orchestra, summoning up the wildness of a Scottish coast and sea by a German composer on holiday – Felix Mendelssohn’s Overture to the Hebrides and the particular place he loved to watch the sea – Fingal’s Cave.

Hugo Alfvén was born in 1872 and started out as a virtuoso violinist, but after becoming a composer he stood out as a great advocator of Swedish national romanticism. His rhapsody for orchestra Midsommarvaka is in four sections and depicts a couple wandering alone in the Nordic light of mid-summer with a Swedish folk song band in the background – a fine description of youth, joy and humour wrapped up in melodic and harmonic elegance.

Anatoly Lyadov was a very influential Russian composer. He was a very private man who famously wrote to his great friend Rimsky Korsakov “Give me fairies and dragons, mermaids and goblins and I am thoroughly happy.” His short essay in orchestration, Le Lac Enchanté, shows what a talented composer he was, conjuring up the beauty of an enchanted lake in music.

Arthur Honegger was born in 1882 to Swiss parents and studied in Paris. He, like Dvo?ák, was a great steam train enthusiast, and he wrote his one movement orchestral piece Pacific 231 inspired by a powerful steam engine – the numbers signifying the wheel combination. Honegger said in an interview that his aim was not to imitate the sound of a locomotive, but to convey in musical form a visual impression of the engine quietly at rest, and the sense of exertion as it starts up and speeds off into the night.

Eric Coates (born in 1886) studied at the Royal Academy of Music and was Principal Viola of the Queens Hall Orchestra, playing under many of the great composers of the time including Elgar and Strauss. As a composer he came into his own in the 1920s and ‘30s as a brilliant writer of ‘light classical’ music. The London Suite is typical of his creative writing and consists of three dances: Covent Garden (Tarantella), Westminster (Meditation) and Knightsbridge (March). The latter was for many years the signature tune to In Town Tonight – in fact when it was first broadcast the BBC had over 20,000 phone calls asking the title of the piece!

George Butterworth sadly died in the trenches of the First World War and was a composer who used the folk songs of Sussex, many collected in 1907 along with his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams. The Banks of Green Willow was written in 1913 and depicts a typically English scene. Sir Adrian Boult premiered the work in Liverpool in 1914, his debut as a professional conductor.

We finish this concert of travel, places and scenes with a brilliant fantasy for orchestra written by Tchaikovsky in 1880 after a trip to Rome with his brother. Capriccio Italien is a compositional essay of the sounds, folk tunes and street music of the Italian capital. Opening with a bugle call, inspired by the early-morning sound of the barracks near his hotel, he moves on to a string melody, then recreates the sounds of street music and, after a quick march, we end with an orchestral tarantella.

Tickets (£12.50-£39.50, 50% student/U18 discount, children just £1) from Brighton Dome Ticket Office, (01273) 709709, www.brightondome.org

Discounted parking (just £6 between 1pm and 6pm) is available for BPO concert-goers at NCP Church Street Car Park. Simply park as normal and collect a follow-on ticket at the concert.

Simon McBurney’s ‘life-enhancing’ production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute returns to ENO

Opens Thursday 14 March 

Simon McBurney’s much-loved production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute returns to the London Coliseum for its third run in March. A collaboration with pioneering theatre company Complicite, this unique rendition of Mozart’s great fable combines singers with a troop of actors evoking a magical world populated with monsters and mystery. Live sound effects, animation, live drawing and the ENO Orchestra raised to stage level make this a joyously accessible operatic event.

Simon McBurney is one of world theatre’s most important contemporary figures. Co-founder and Artistic Director of theatre company Complicite, his vast body of work includes A Disappearing Number, The Master and Margarita and for ENO A Dog’s Heart, nominated for an Olivier Award for Best New Opera Production in 2011. His film and television roles include those in Rev, Harry Potter and Mission Impossible, with his ‘astonishing’ (The New York Times) one-man-show The Encounter currently being made into a film.

Rupert Charlesworth takes up his first ENO leading role as Tamino. He was last seen at ENO as Emilio in Partenope in 2017: ‘absolutely dazzles’ (The Arts Desk).

He is joined by soprano Lucy Crowe, who returns to the role of Pamina: ‘London’s best sung Pamina in years’ (The Guardian) that gained her such plaudits for the last run in 2016.  Since then she has given a very well-received Countess in Fiona Shaw’s The Marriage of Figaro in 2018: ‘her sound has such warmth, fullness, and power that it suffuses the whole auditorium with a golden glow’ (The Independent).

Thomas Oliemans takes on another great Mozart comic baritone role as the bumbling birdcatcher Papageno after impressing in the title role of The Marriage of Figaro in 2018. A veteran of this production, he has sung its Papageno at both the Dutch National Opera and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence: ‘a well-deserved audience darling’ (The New York Times).

German soprano Julia Bauer makes her house debut as the villainous Queen of the Night, having performed it on many occasions in her native Germany, including multiple well- received performances at the Komische Oper Berlin.

Brindley Sherratt sings Sarastro, reprising a role he last sang with the company in 2007. Associated with many ENO roles including Ramfis in Phelim McDermott’s Aida, Creon in Charpentier’s Medea and Pimen in Boris Godunov, he is Artist in Residence and Advisor to the Harewood Artists.

Monostatos is sung by Daniel Norman, who sang the First Jew earlier in the season in Salome. ENO Harewood Artist Rowan Pierce sings Papagena, her second role with the company after a ‘scorching’ (WhatsonStage) performance in Paul Bunyan as Tiny, one she will reprise in May at Alexandra Palace Theatre.

Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic and winner of the Salzburg Festival Young Conductor’s Award Ben Gernon makes his ENO debut. He is one of the youngest conductors to have held a titled position with a BBC orchestra.

The Magic Flute opens Thursday 14 March at 7.30pm for 9 performances: 14, 21, 23, and 28 March and 2, 9 and 11 April at 7.30pm, 16 March at 6.30pm and 6 April at 3pm

500 tickets for £20 or less are available for each performance. Tickets start from £12*.

English National Opera presents a sparkling new production of the 20^th century’s most popular operetta

One of the most successful musical comedies in history returns to the London Coliseum stage in March, in a brand new version fizzing with wit and invention. Old Vic Associate Director Max Webster makes his ENO debut with the company’s first new staging in more than a decade of the beloved 1905 Viennese operetta. The original libretto that has delighted audiences across the world for more than century is given a new English translation by dramatist April de Angelis and lyricist Richard Thomas.

This operetta enjoyed unprecedented popularity and was performed an estimated half a million times across the world in its first 60 years. It acted as the bridge that would lead from opera to the rise of 20^th century musical theatre. The story of the wealthy widow Hanna Glawari and her pursuit by men trying to keep her wealth in their bankrupt Balkan nation forms a classic romantic comedy, containing some of the most beloved music in opera including the Merry Widow Waltz and the ‘Vilja Song’.

Max Webster is Associate Director at the Old Vic, where his 2015 production of The Lorax garnered universal acclaim (‘the best family show since Matilda’ – 5*, The Guardian). His theatrical style with its ‘singular sense of the carnivalesque’ (WhatsonStage) is now brought to bear on the ENO comic opera tradition that brought Cal McCrystal’s standing-room-only Iolanthe to the Coliseum in 2018.

Hanna is sung by Sarah Tynan, one of the sopranos most associated with ENO, in her second lead role of the season after 2018’s rapturously received Lucia in Lucia di Lammemoor (‘exquisite’ – The Daily Telegraph). In 2017 her Rosina in The Barber of Seville (‘impeccable’– The Independent) and the title role of Partenope (‘dazzling’ – WhatsOnStage) showed her comic abilities to great effect. An alumna of the ENO Harewood Artist programme, she is fast becoming acknowledged as one of the UK’s leading sopranos.

Nathan Gunn makes his ENO debut as Hanna’s former lover Danilo. One of America’s most in-demand baritones, he has ‘everything that today’s opera fans look for in a singer: a beautiful voice, first-class acting and a great sense of humour’ (Bachtrack). He previously sang the role with the Metropolitan Opera, New York in 2014, opposite Renée Fleming.

ENO house favourite Andrew Shore sings the scheming diplomat Baron Zeta, adding another great buffo role to his ENO roster that has included hilarious turns as The Lord Chancellor in 2018’s Iolanthe (‘patter-perfect’ – WhatsonStage), Major-General Stanley in 2015’s The Pirates of Penzance, many Bartolos in The Barber of Seville, and more than thirty other productions.

Nicholas Lester returns to the ENO stage following a successful run as Marcello in La bohème (‘oozes vocal charm’ – The Guardian) to sing the Vicomte Cascada, while Jamie MacDougall sings Raoul.

Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska makes her ENO debut with this production, as well as her debut with a UK opera company. She is known on the continent for her distinguished career at the Komische Oper Berlin where she was First Kapellmeister from 2011 to 2016, winning the Deutscher Dirigentenpreis in 2013. From the 2019/20 season she will be the Music Director at Theater Basel.

Set design is by Ben Stones, who previously designed Max Webster’s Twelfth Night at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 2014. This marks his operatic debut after designs for productions at the National, Young Vic, Almeida and Bush theatres as well as Burberry fashion shows.

Costume design is by Esther Bialas, whose designs were last seen at ENO for La traviata in 2018. She is known on the continent for her extensive work at Komische Oper Berlin with Barrie Kosky. Lighting design is by Bruno Poet, whose ENO work includes Akhnaten, Satyagraha and Aida.